Burgeoning voters list in Assam evokes controversy

GUWAHATI - Assam has witnessed an increase of about 600,000 voters in the final electoral rolls 2010 published by the state election commission, triggering doubts that names of illegal Bangladeshis could have entered the rolls.

There has been an increase of 3.29 percent in the number of voters compared to the draft rolls for the 2009 parliamentary elections - the number of voters has swelled to 17,953,112, an increase of about 571,445.

According to commission sources, names of an estimated 315,943 voters were deleted in the final electoral rolls - some of them doubtful citizens and others who might have died or on some technical grounds.

But the publication of the electoral rolls has already triggered a debate with the politics of citizenship taking centre stage ahead of next year’s assembly elections.

“We have to carefully go through the voters list, but prima facie it appears the increase in the number of electors seems very high,” Chandra Mohan Patowary, president of Assam’s main opposition Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), told IANS.

The issue of citizenship in Assam has always remained a controversial and sensitive issue with allegations that hordes of illegal migrants enter the state from Bangladesh by crossing over through stretches of the unfenced border.

“The increase in the number of voters by 3.29 percent is quite significant and we really need to analyse the whole issue in depth,” Assam unit president of the Bharatiya Janata Party Ranjit Dutta said.

But the Asom United Democratic Front (AUDF), a minority-based political party, is unfazed by the increase in the number of voters.

“There is nothing abnormal in the figures and we believe it is very much within the national average,” AUDF working president Hafiz Rashid Choudhury said.

There have always been doubts expressed and allegations that the voters list in Assam was never free from names of Bangladeshi nationals.

“The voters list is yet to be made public so far and hence it would be too early to comment. But then we want a voters list that is free from names of any Bangladeshi national,” an All Assam Students Union (AASU) leader said.

The AASU had led a six-year-long agitation against illegal Bangladeshi migrants between 1979 and 1985. The uprising ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 that fixed March 25, 1971 as the cut-off date for detection and expulsion of the illegal aliens.

(Syed Zarir Hussain can be contacted at zarir.h@ians.in